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60GB iPod Coming?
An anonymous reader writes "Toshiba today announced that it will offer a 60GB version of its 1.8-inch hard drive in the coming months and that Apple has already placed its order. Cindy Lee, deputy manager of Toshiba's hard disk drive division, said the drive will enter mass production during July or August. All three iPod models (15GB, 20GB, and 40GB) use Toshiba drives, while the iPod mini uses a 4GB 1-inch drive from Hitachi. Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000 of the 1.8-inch drives per month to Apple."
I have to upgrade my 40g ipod already!?!
Im only hovering on 5g of songs!
Fill it with porn of course!
Seems perfectly timed to coincide with MacWorld. So that's two announcements we know about now - Tiger and the 60 GB iPod. Wonder what the surprise will be. 3.0 G5s? G5 notebooks? iPonies?
Philip Sandifer's academic website
I'm in the process of "reripping" my entire CD collection at the moment. I've got the extra space, so why should I be listening to 128kbps MP3 files ripped in 1999?
My 3g 30gb iPod is already full, and I'd love to be able to rip most of my music into Apple Lossless and use it on the new 60gb iPod!
Just because you don't have that much music doesn't mean other people don't.
Also, an external backup solution doesn't make your stomach sink when you get a ding or scratch on the casing.
:(
I hate scratches.
Insert witty Slashdot sig here.
for those complaining about not being able to fill the HD, the easiest way to use the space is to reencode the music you already have.
just with some quick calculations i did on my own, saving your music as in a lossless format uses approx. 5x as much space as a 256kb MP3.
so only 12GB of mp3's will give you your 60GB of music.
Does Apple have any plans to beef up their offerings, or are they counting on consumers to keep paying for the iPod's hipster image?
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
The price of small-factor drives on the retail market have such a markup that their are actually some music players out there that have a street price lower than the street price of the drive that they contain inside... this is possible because the device-makers are buying the drives on the wholesale market in bulk rather than one at a time.
But it brings up an interesting point... right now there are far more digital music players out there on the market than there are makers of small-factor HDs.
So you only listen to 50 songs on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be cool if you had every song you'd ever owned available on the fly? When you know precisely the right song for this exact mood, and it's right there, that's pretty awesome.
Do you need it? Of course not. You don't really need any of this. It's entertainment. You need your insulin shots, or your defibrillator.
Some people really, really, really like to have all their music with them all the time. (Not me. I don't listen to music. But I have many friends who do.) It only takes a few hundred thousand of 'em to make it worthwhile for Apple to make this.
Let me be the first to say "40GB is enough for anyone".
So maybe the 60GB drive is for the mythical video iPod. (Not.)
Do you listen to 3:05 minute pop songs? I don't. I have a alllot of classical music I would love to take with me. They take up alot of space.
Anyone notice that "Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000" but Apple are stepping up production from 800,000 to 1,000,000 per month...where are all the other drives sourced from?
-- Sig meltdown immine...
Easy (my 30 gig Ipod is full)
-17 gig songs (granted, a 4000+ collection is fairly rare... and i could go to 128 instead of 160)
-Encrypted backup disk images of
digital pictures of friends, family, myself
backup documents from all my classes
family guy episodes
-Standard apple iSync stuff (very small, mind you)
contacts, address book, iCal, etc
I have about 3 gigs free right now (not COMPLETELY full, but close). Bear in mind, my music collection continues to grow, and I have stuff from my office that would be nice to have another backup in my pocket... just in case.
So absurd? probably. But if i didn't have an iPod and was given a choice between a 20,40, and 60... i might still jump for the 60. Always better to have room to grow.
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
So is Apple ever going to drop the pricing on the other models when they come out with more "advanced" ones?
The more you know, the less you understand.
Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car. Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.
first, there are a lot of people with more than 40 gigs of music.... second, the iPod is also a firewire drive. it can be used for transporting large files (graphics, audio, video, whatever). it is also possible to boot off of OS X installed on the iPod, so you can dump your whole HD on there. The early lists of 10.3 features mentioned a feature called "home on iPod" that later vanished. it seemed you could copy/sync your whole home dir onto your ipod and login to it from any OS X running Mac. if that's really coming, the more space for music AND home dir, the better.
Something I've always wondered: just how resistant are these HDs to (physical) shocks? If you drop an iPod while it's reading from the disk, for example, will it still work or will you be left with a worthless chunk of metal and plastic? Portable devices tend to get a lot of wear and tear, so I'd tend to stay away from anything using such a seemingly fragile storage medium.
Peace
Lets get this out of the way:
1. 60GB?!? Who would ever use that much space?
2. 60GB?!? Thank god, I'm out of space on my 40GB.
3. Does it support Ogg?
4. Stop whining about Ogg!
5. Apple rules!
6. Apple sucks/is dying/is out of touch!
7. Imagine a Beowulf cluster...
8. The Nomad/Muvo/two cans and a stick are just as good or better.
9. I, for one, welcome our excessive HD space Overlords
10. In Soviet Russia 60GB iPods buy You!
Thanks. I can afford it because Red Hat bought my company in 2000.
Twit.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Ahh, good ol napster.
I think you need to do some homework.
/usr/src/sys/ufs ./*
Just because a linux kernel can read UFS doesn't mean it's GPL'd. Almost any unix including commercial ones like Solaris can use UFS. In fact it is the default filesystem used by Solaris. Nowhere does Sun distribute the source to their UFS implementation.
And then there is this:
$ uname -a
FreeBSD xxxx.xxx 5.2.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE
$ pwd
$ grep -ir GPL
$
So are the BSD guys violating too? Not likely.
Next thing you know cops will pull you over just to scan through your iPod's storehouse looking for pirated music. No doubt someone will die choking on the iPod he frantically tried to swallow...
Not wanting to reply to trolls but just in case anyone actually believes this crap, UFS the filesystem used by BSD systems. If Apple are indeed using this filesystem for the iPod (and it is included in OSX), I'm sure they would be using one of the many BSD implementations and wouldnt bother ripping off a GPL one illegally.....
I also keep another 900 GB offline in a storage unit as a backup. I do not want to have to rerip. So that's a surcharge of $1.33 per CD, which means that my music infrastructure is done. I never have to worry about it again, modulo replacing harddrives and reencoding to new codecs, at least until 5.1/SACD/DVD-Audio/Whatever mature as audio formats with the whole software ecology around them evolving. It's tempting, but I don't like that I'd have to use an Apple closed source tool to access the data. Right now, I can convert my AIFFs on any system with a C compiler and a firewire port, so it's safer format. That decision will change if I can ever get source for something that will decode ALE back to WAV of AIFF.
Similarly, I don't use the other lossless encoders because they're not supported in iTunes/iPod, my preferred music playback platforms.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
My understanding is they were making footage in New Zealand and Peter Jackson was in London organising the score, Jackson had to see what they were doing and make suggestions the only fast pipe they had was some distance from where Jackson was working/staying at The Dorchester so they downloaded to ipods and then carried them to Jackson's hotel.
Nearly lost a late cut of the film in a mugging as well if the DVD is to be believed.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
"Encrypted backup disk images of digital pictures of friends, family, myself"
Wow. What kinda tinfoil-beanie wearing nutjob do you have to be to encrypt your family photos? Who're your family, the Sopranos or the Bin Ladens?
If you have that much music available, I would think you have something like $10,000 worth of CDs.
:)
A $500 iPod is pocket change.
Cheap insurance, especially if you keep your CDs in a safety deposit box
GPL Deconstructed
Granted the HD does not spin all the time. But I have had incidents where my iPod has been hurled on the floor at great velocity, and also driven along very bumpy roads with a sport suspension and the iPod playing the whole time - and this is the original 5GB model.
I think few things short of a sledge hammer are even going to make the iPod skip, much less harm the drive. I have yet to ever hear the iPod skip for any reason.
I did have a little less luck with a portable photo storage device that used an HD - I was jogging along with it in the lower pocket of my shorts bouncing against my leg while it was writing files from a CF card to the HD. In that case I did manage to get one bad sector on the drive, but that was pretty good considering the abuse it was going through (I wanted to see what extremes it could take for shock while operating). I don't know if that drive (standard laptop drive) was any differently speced than the iPod drive though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because you hopefully have better things to do than to rerip your whole CD collection for an improvement so small you can't possibly notice it while listenting through consumer headphones with your computer on in the background?
:)
But I shouldn't talk. I'm actually considering the same thing since I don't have anything better to do
Cheers.
Can we at least try to spell things the right way? Let's have some coherent discourse, and leave the typos at home.
Show the world you care about good communication. Fucking learn to communicate coherently. Classical music my fucking arse, you can't even spell.
here's a fantastic idea,
instead of removing the hdd from your ipod and potentially voiding your warranty say y or m to;
"CONFIG_SCSI", "CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD", "CONFIG_IEEE1394", "CONFIG_IEEE1394_SBP2"
reboot with your new kernel (or modprobe the modules) connect your ipod and mount as you did before (except it will appear as a scsi disk)
While I had thought about this, I realized that my iPod is also the bit of storage that I own most likely to be stolen. Having my critical files (i.e. financial records, tax returns, address books, etc.) on a device that has a (relatively) high likelyhood of being lost or stolen seems like a very bad idea.
On second thought, of course, you could always encrypt everything that you store there, but that's a more complex backup system and one that I'd bet a lot of people aren't as likely to keep up with...
But yeah, encryption is an option, dare I say a necessity, if you want to use your iPod for backup.
your plan has merits, but one colossal drawback.
The iPod's most serious drawback is its battery life. The biggest power drain on the iPod is when it spins up the HD to load new files. Encoding all your music into a lossless format will cause it to access the HD multiple times for each song, in most cases.
Therefore filling your ipod with losslessly encoded files and then playing them will flatten the battery at a very fast pace indeed.
The best use of 60gig iPod drive is to use it to store other large files - avi files for example...
--
I can;t even fill my 30Gb Nomad. What the hell are you going to do with 60Gb?
It's amazing how narrowly people seem to need to define the iPod. And I'm surprised that so many slashdotters can't seem to see past the "iPod == music player" shortsightedness.
iPod is a great music player, but it's also a great way to carry around a LOT of data of any kind.
iPod is also a hardware platform. That fact is emphasized by Apple's recent reorganization into a Macintosh group and an iPod group. At the moment it seems to be a relatively closed platform, but it has a processor, plenty of memory, a big disk, power, and I/O. It remains to be seen how Apple will use that platform, and when, but it's a pretty good guess that they'll do something interesting with it.
That would be very cool, but FAA rules are kind of strange about this sort of thing. If a device is defined to be portable, it's the PIC's (Pilot In Command's) judgment as to whether it can be used in the cockpit safely without interfering with the airworthiness of the aircraft.
On the other hand, if it's a fixed installation, there's a ton of paperwork and bureacracy that has to be gone through in order to get FAA approval and navigating it correctly is neither quick nor cheap.
Worse than that, but as a mere pilot, I'm not authorized to do more than minor cosmetic and maintenance tasks on my airplane - I need somebody certified by the FAA to work on avionics in order to work on my panel. And they do not work cheap.
On top of all that, I do want to be able to take my music library with me in the car too, so portable is preferable to me anyway.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
In addition, any of the modern Macs can also boot off the iPod as well.
Yes, but...
The iPod really isn't intended to run the drive continuously.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you're using an Apple computer, it's easy to use their built-in home directory encryption and mirror that on your iPod.
Microsoft's xPod will have 600 GB! It will go for 8 months on a single charge, and cost less than $50.
Hell, we may even give them away in cereal packets!
Please wait for it and don't go buying one of those silly white iPods. Our xPod will be black. Black is cool! It will run super-DRM, hyper-product activated music in the form of the industry standard (it's a STANDARD okay... or else) WMA, which is what everyone wants, in the sense of "here's where you're going today" kind of wants.
And no, there is no truth that WMA stands for "We May Ask for your first child." Who do you think we are, bloodsucking vampires or something. (Looks like we'll have to start using smaller print on the EULAs.)
Oh please please please wait for the Microsoft xPod. I wanna be just like you Steve. I've even started to wear turtlenecks and say "phenomenal" all the time... We wants it, the precious.
Just a few reminders of what various slashdotters originally though of the iPod before "iPods are the shiznit" became /. canon.
;-)" - jaoswald
.. "groundbreaking" I think was the term I heard them use to describe this new secret product the other day. How "groundbreaking" can something be when I can walk up the street and buy something with similar (and in some cases, additional/better) features? Sigh. One day Apple will live up to the hype. OS X is cool, and their plastic molding team has skills, but the hardware just sucks." - nebby
"iPod is a good product, but nothing to get excited over." - harlows_monkeys
"It's not cool at all. It's just another Mac attempt to have the coolest looking, hippest sounding gadget on the market. It adds nothing serious to the current options. For instance, no Ogg Vorbis support (and yes, I realize it probably decodes mp3 in hardware, but...) and it doesn't appear to be cross-platform. I guess this falls into the Dilbert principle of "the best target market is stupid rich people." Since they'll fall for anything and have the money to burn on it." - ichimunki
"...the "rose-colored glasses that you will need for this to seem like a worthwhile product. What a let-down, geez!!" - david614
"People need to realize that all apple ever really delivers is mediocre equipment that, while it may look really cool, is less technically advanced/powerfull/whatever than competing products that cost 20-25% less." - greysky
"A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else. Agree with the article poster - Lame. Not only is this a lackluster MP3 unit (which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners), but it has virtually no UI wizardry that might define it as an Apple product. A total waste of time." - Ars-Fartsica
"I'd rather pay $100 for a Rio Volt. 700mb of songs per CD with an unlimited number of CD's, provided you change them. Yeah, this should compete favorably with the solid state units, but they've already lost to the CD-MP3 units, IMO." - Fred Ferrigno
"I think it'll sell as well as the G4 Cube. Oops.
"And I was all excited they were gooing to release a OS X based wireless web pad. Instead we get yet another portable MP3 player
"I am very sad that Apple seems to be repeating the same mistake they made with the Cube - great, nifty product that anyone would love to own, except that it's burdened by an unbelievably poor price/performance ratio." - jchristopher (Apple shareholder)
"...this was a VERY poor design decision. This could have been a $150 device if they'd used a regular laptop drive." - jchristopher again
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.